Always the classics
Since this blog went up in January, I’ve written several weekly posts about primarily interactive and visual forms of entertainment, but the title of this post is about a form of entertainment that I don’t see most people discuss online a lot: music.
I hang around on the anime-based subreddits more so than anything music related, so these two fields collide mostly in passing than directly. The outliers here would be the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure series and anime themed around music like Your Lie in April, Carole and Tuesday, K-On!, and Detroit Metal City. Does this mean the fundamentals of the discussion are different in music? Nope.
In anime, one of the most enduring discussions is dubs or subs. Video games have the console wars, and TV in general tends to have heated debate over what show is good or if X show is better than Y. All bog standard really, and regarding music, fittingly the songs are all the same. Old people music, dad rock, new age music… the debate around music has ties to the generational gaps. In modern history, it took pioneers within an established group to form something new, and in western music in particular, most music genres were spearheaded by black Americans in history. In the 1910s and during the First World War, 1st. Lt. James Reese Europe was known as the father of ragtime music. The interwar era and after had musicians like Robert Johnson, Lead Belly, Louis Armstrong who led the music world in jazz during and following the Roaring 20s; and during the counterculture, civil rights era, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, and the Jackson 5 helped open doors for more music genres to follow.
You might know more about the last group considering the reach they’ve all had since the 1960s compared to the musicians from before. And they all tend to reflect the differences in musical genres that they all grew up with and eventually grew to develop all their own. My family is definitely familiar with a lot of these musicians and the people they inspired or even collaborated with. Being with my mom, and being one of the younger people in my family, I was normally exposed to the older musicians and such.
In the eighth grade going onto high school, I started listening to AC/DC. My friend brought over his Xbox 360 which I didn’t have at the time yet, and one of the games for the system (GTA IV) had AC/DC on the in-game classic rock radio station at the time. After that I listened to more of the band in the first half of high school and continued on to more classic rock bands by day and metal bands at night. Most often my introduction came from hearing the music in a different medium. Chief among them: TV.
Above all, AC/DC and other bands like Guns n’ Roses benefitted fairly well from commercial advertising like the video above. I discovered other bands through a variety of different media. If it wasn’t TV or video games like GTA, it was different fan projects and animations. As much as I prefer older music, it’s clearly not the only type I listen to.
Online, there’s a series of stick figure animatics called Killing Spree created by Australian animator Sam Green. Going by the name of the series, the nature of its content is inherently violent even for a stick figure animatic. Fittingly, part of the soundtrack makes use of metal as a whole, the most common soundtracks coming from the band Disturbed.
Some of the tracks from their albums were used for background music in the animations and they inspired me to look through the rest of the band’s track list when I was in the tenth and eleventh grades. By the time I was a senior, this part of my metal phase influenced most of my tastes. Some of these aspects I still have and others I’ve abandoned because looking back, it was just stupid.
Black on everything gets a bit dull after a while, but one of the more memorable moments from this point in my life was a hand-me-down Led Zeppelin T-shirt that was a good luck charm to me about 85% of the time I had it on or near me. Then I graduated and the power of luck was seemed to have been wasted in high school. It was good while it lasted, but it didn’t stop me from listening to multiple different musicians. Throughout college and even now, I’ve diversified my tastes quite a bit. Rock, metal, and grunge are my top three all around, but I have since branched out. Though, I have a line drawn at certain genres and artists.
The spotlight makes it extremely difficult to be a controversy-free figure and I acknowledge that many of my favorite rock and metal icons have been under fire for various reasons. Looking deeper at the context though, there’s a difference between a minor legal trouble and being a ginormous jerk. In the case of the God of War series, the protagonist Kratos was an a-hole, but there were things he still cared about: glory, Sparta, and his family. Musicians across different genres have courted controversy and once or twice, especially by accident, tends to be forgiven. Sure, it’s embarrassing to learn that this musician got a DUI or an unpaid parking ticket or — if the rumors are true — flushed their drugs down the toilet to avoid the police, not realizing The Police was another British rock band, as what I’d heard had happened to the Rolling Stones. Sidenote: I just googled that to see if it was true and several articles seemed to have confirmed it. Like this one below:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-may-21-et-quick21.5-story.html
But some of this stuff is peanuts compared to what some other musicians have done off stage. Rappers like XXXTentacion and Tekashi 69 have been in hot water for more serious offenses like assault or trafficking, Kanye in December of 2022 sung the praises of Adolf Hitler while on a show with Alex Jones, and the less said about neo-Nazi hate music, the better.
But of course, I’m cherry picking. We each have our tastes and if I played the role of the old man yelling at the clouds any further, I’d live up to the old satanic panic narrative that followed metal bands and funny enough DND for years.
And the “ban this filth” nonsense has been around for ages, and around most aspects of media and entertainment. It’s all but lost on us now, but if you ask an old person who was there, two of the most outrageous topics of discussion would’ve either been Elvis shaking those hips or John Lennon placing the Beatles’ fame above that of Jesus Christ in the Bible Belt states.
For me personally, my mom was the one to introduce and inspire my affection for classic rock and such so she didn’t resist or protest my tastes. My grandma, on the other hand, tried at the start but she stopped when she realized some of the bands I listened to were all around her age now, and there were more important stuff to focus on than who I was listening to. Call me the oddball, but if it was hard for me to take violent video games seriously, then there was really no hope for the supposed satanic messages in Stairway to Heaven.
This week’s YouTube recommendation is akidearest. Months ago, I recommended the Trash Taste podcast and the individual hosts’ YouTube channels. This time, one of them, Joey “The Anime Man” Bizinger’s girlfriend, Agnes “akidearest” Diego, is also a content creator with a channel of her own. She began in 2014 describing different aspects of anime as a whole from associated conventions to a bunch of different tropes across many shows.
Since moving to Japan, she has continued with this type of content while also adding in different aspects of life in Japan, particularly different customs and conveniences that contribute to the culture shock likely to be experienced by foreigners to Japan. As a bonus, both Akidearest and The Anime Man have a video about their most recent trip to the Philippines.
Opinions on Entertainment 